1.



The AI doesn't group it's ships into the largest possible fleet before attacking. For example, I had a fleet 9 of 9 CP fleet invading a Craver system. They sent 3 fleets: 7/9, 7/9, 4/9. They attacked with the 7/9, 7/9 and were destroyed. What they should have done is merge the cruisers from the 4/9 fleet into the other two fleets. Then they could have attacked with 9/9, 9/9 and had a better chance of success.



This is a major weakness in the AI. Is there anything I can change in the mod files to fix this? Can you update the game engine to fix this?



If re-arranging the fleets prior to attack is too difficult to implement, then how about changing it so they don't send a fleet out until it is at max CP?









2.



The game won't play music with my standalone the mod unless I copy



C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Endless Space\Public\Audio



to



C:\Users\Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding\HeavyNova\



output_log.txt shows an error unable to find file. I don't want to include the audio folder with the mod because the files are too big. Can you update the game so it looks in both places for the audio files?









3.



The AI for the Sowers gives them a preference for colonizing desert worlds on new systems. Since desert worlds have zero dust, they wind up with 100% tax and no growth. None of the settings in Personality.xml seem to affect this. The game seems to be hard-coded to pick desert over tundra based on the industry value of the planet. They also have a tendency to give their home world a money focus which prevents colonization of other planets in the system and results in stalled growth. In the Heavy Nova mod, I address this by giving them the Entrepreneur trait and they no longer lag behind all the time; however, this exceeds the trait point limit.

4. The game puts the largest repair module on a ship even though the template specifies a percentage such as 10%. This results in corvettes without enough space left for weapons. Can you change it to use the percentage specified in the ship design templates?

I think problem number 1 is a common progrmming task, which should be implemented directly in game.

5. Need more ship design slots. There are three basic weapon types: missile, kinetic, and beam. There are five hull sizes: corvette, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, dreadnaught. Due to combat mechanics, each ship should have one weapon type. That means three times five or fifteen slots are required to represent them all. Add in a colony ship and the number of slots should be increased from the current ten to sixteen.



6. Pirates spawn too frequently. In several games, I noticed one of the races didn't colonize one of their systems. By the time I got there to conquer them; the pirates had taken a couple of their systems. When I got to the neutral system it had over a dozen pirate fleets around it. After cleaning them out, it took me two turns to make a colony ship and send it there. In that time, another pirate fleet had spawned. It seems like the pirates spawn too fast and too many.



7. Need to be able to see more fleets at once on the combat screen. Currently, it only shows eight ships from each side and the player needs to scroll to see more. The game should display more depending on the screen resolution.



8. Need a 'Clear All' button on the ship design screen. When upgrading my ship designs to take advantage of new technology, I often like to start from a clean slate. Currently, I have to click a hundred times to remove everything. It should be straightforward to implement a clear all button that removes all the components from the ship.



9. Too many close-ups during combat. I generally want to see both fleets shooting at each other. The most important thing to see is when big hits land. I often have to use the free camera to prevent the game from zooming in on a ship in the middle of the action.



10. Race eliminated message is too generic. It doesn't even tell the player which race was eliminated or who eliminated them which is uninformative.



11. Notification of war message is too generic. It doesn't tell the player why the race decided to go to war with them which makes the faction seem erratic and unreliable.



12. No cut scene on game victory leaves the player flat. Most games provide a small movie describing the player's victory to increase the satisfaction from winning the game. Endless space could benefit from this too.

I merged your posts. Please refrain from posting multiple replies (8) after each other.